The Wonders of Instinct: Chapters in the Psychology of Insects

February has its sunny days, heralding spring, to which rude winter will reluctantly yield place. In snug corners, among the rocks, the great spurge of our district, the characi...

The fowling-snare is one of man's ingenious villainies. With lines, pegs and poles, two large, earth-coloured nets are stretched upon the ground, one to the right, the other to...

The cabbage of our modern kitchen-gardens is a semi-artificial plant, the produce of our agricultural ingenuity quite as much as of the niggardly gifts of nature. Spontaneous ve...

Michelet has told us how, as a printer's apprentice in a cellar, he established amicable relations with a Spider. (Jules Michelet (1798-1874), author of "L'Oiseau" and "L'Insect...

Let us proceed to the rational prowess which has earned for the Necrophorus the better part of his renown and, to begin with, let us submit the case related by Clairville--that...

Drover Dingdong's Sheep followed the Ram which Panurge had maliciously thrown overboard and leapt nimbly into the sea, one after the other, "for you know," says Rabelais, "it is...

Few insects in our climes vie in popular fame with the Glow-worm, that curious little animal which, to celebrate the little joys of life, kindles a beacon at its tail-end. Who d...

A wasp-like garb of motley black and yellow; a slender and graceful figure; wings not spread out flat, when resting, but folded lengthwise in two; the abdomen a sort of chemist'...

To purge the earth of death's impurities and cause deceased animal matter to be once more numbered among the treasures of life there are hosts of sausage-queens, including, in o...

Beside the footpath in April lies the Mole, disembowelled by the peasant's spade; at the foot of the hedge the pitiless urchin has stoned to death the Lizard, who was about to d...

My youthful meditations owe some happy moments to Condillac's famous statue which, when endowed with the sense of smell, inhales the scent of a rose and out of that single impre...

We are in the middle of July. The astronomical dog-days are just beginning; but in reality the torrid season has anticipated the calendar and for some weeks past the heat has be...

This is what I wished for, hoc erat in votis: a bit of land, oh, not so very large, but fenced in, to avoid the drawbacks of a public way; an abandoned, barren, sun-scorched bit...

The sea, life's first foster-mother, still preserves in her depths many of those singular and incongruous shapes which were the earliest attempts of the animal kingdom; the land...

EXPERIMENT 1. The mole is fixed fore and aft, with a lashing of raphia, to a light horizontal cross-bar resting on two forks. The Necrophori, after long tiring themselves in dig...